New Life Church and its leader, Brady Boyd, have walked through some of the longest, darkest valleys in American church history, but Colorado Spring’s best-known evangelical powerhouse is experiencing new life.
Boyd has had one of the toughest jobs in ministry – succeeding New Life’s famous founder, Ted Haggard, after a national scandal ripped him from the pulpit in November 2006. Yet the shame, embarrassment and sense of loss the church felt at the exile of the charismatic and beloved Haggard wouldn’t be the low point, Boyd said.
That would come 13 months later, Dec. 9, 2007, when a young gunman would kill two teenagers and wound their father, terrorizing the congregation as it left Sunday services. Wounded by a church security guard, shooter Matthew Murray would take his own life after a rampage in the church parking lot and halls. The night before, Murray had killed two young adults at Arvada’s Youth With A Mission training center.
Boyd, now 44, had been on the job as the new senior pastor of New Life only four months when the 24-year-old Murray plunged his church into a period of mourning and fear.
During his congregation’s long shared nightmare, Brady never lost his belief in God, yet he still had to fight depression and personal doubts. He seriously considered quitting, he said, but instead waited, sometimes impatiently, for God’s healing. He wasn’t disappointed.
“Last year we gave ourselves permission to dream again,” Boyd said Thursday.
Boyd, who had declined a flood of offers to write a book immediately following the killings, decided two years later it was finally time to tell the whole story from inside the church.
His book, “Fear No Evil: A Test of Faith, A Courageous Church and An Unfailing God,” will be out Tuesday. Proceeds of the Zondervan-published book will go to the church.
And New Life will begin an important new ministry this summer when it opens the first of several planned low-cost medical clinics, Dream Centers of Colorado Springs.
The church is growing again and has about 10,000 active members, Boyd said. The budget is stable again after the church experienced the severe pressures of declining rolls and a terrible economy. However, Boyd said, the church isn’t focusing on growth, new buildings, coffers, political influence or any other standard markers of megachurch success.
“What came out of the ashes was that we could be simple – a circle of friends who could love God and love each other,” Boyd said.
New Life’s dogged determination to overcome scandal and tragedy has impressed evangelical giants such as Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill. Hybels has said the kind of “back-to-back blows” that New Life experienced would have destroyed many churches.
Boyd said the holiday season before the shooting was joyful. It had felt to him as if New Life had finally turned the corner on the Haggard scandal, which involved Haggard’s purchase of sexual services and drugs from a male prostitute over a three-year period.
“It felt as though we were all inhaling fresh air for the first time in … a year,” Boyd wrote.
The day of the shooting, Boyd had just the church lobby for his office when gunfire erupted. A security team member told him to stay in his office, where he watched helplessly from his second-story window, he said, as men, women and children ran out of church, shielding their heads from the bullets in the air.
“It was agonizing,” Boyd wrote. “I had never before seen such a heart-wrenching scene.”
He would see more of them. After the shooting stopped, authorities led surviving witnesses into New Life’s large permanent tent. There Boyd saw a blood-soaked and dazed Marie Works huddling with her surviving daughter. Her other two girls, Stephanie, 18, and Rachel, 16, had been fatally wounded as they climbed into the family minivan. Marie Works didn’t yet know that her husband David, en route to the hospital, would survive his injuries.
Next Boyd made the rounds of national media outlets eager for the story – CNN’s “Larry King Live”, ABC’s “Good Morning America” and others. When he faced his own congregation, he wrote, for the first time in his life he didn’t always know what to say. So he relied on Scripture, such as Psalm 27, to say it for him:
“The Lord is the stronghold of my life – of whom shall I be afraid. When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and foes attack me, they will stumble and fall.”
Boyd had heard mumblings in the hallways – that the church’s best days were behind it; the church might be cursed; and, “the church should have been shut down and turned into a used-car lot.” He and his staff often found themselves, weary, confused and frustrated. But they would face their pain and grow in spirit, he said.
“Jesus says that anyone who comes after him must be willing to deny himself, take up his cross and follow him. The cross is the symbol of death – horrific death,” Boyd wrote.
“There are questions you’ll never have answers for this side of heaven,” he said.
It’s why so many people can’t make the commitment to Jesus, he said. They can’t bear to sacrifice their own agendas, habits and passions.
“It’s also why so many pastors today won’t preach the message of promised suffering,” Boyd said. “If they themselves aren’t willing to take up their crosses, how on earth can the compel others to follow suit.”
Suffering made New Life stronger in character and faith, Boyd said. And amid the suffering, there were grace notes.
Boyd’s staff quietly arranged for David and Marie Works to meet the shooter’s parents, Ronald and Loretta Murray, soon after the shootings, on Jan. 8, 2008. They embraced, wept and prayed together as grieving parents.
“It was the most genuine display of forgiveness I have had the privilege of witnessing firsthand,” Boyd wrote. The congregation understood that, if the Works family could forgive, so could they all.
The New Life meeting took place without media coverage, but Focus on the Family’s James Dobson would make headlines by broadcasting via radio a reunion of the two sets of parents on Feb. 28.
Boyd said another bright spot occurred when he called on staff to recall their fondest memories of the early church and Haggard. He said it was like the Jews recalling Zion when they were exiled from their home. The exercise made them laugh. Remembering the church before the heartache of the scandal, Boyd said, helped to heal them.
Boyd himself was often too busy leading to grieve, he said, but grief would come, along with depression that wouldn’t really lift until January 2010.
A big part of the church’s frustration was the surfacing of new allegations against Haggard, who continued to garner headlines and TV appearances. In early 2009, a former New Life volunteer reported having had inappropriate sexual relations with Haggard while he was in his early 20s. The church reached a confidential settlement with the man, and Boyd would be accused in the media of paying “hush money.”
Boyd said it seemed then the church couldn’t move past Haggard’s misdeeds, and now his own integrity was called into question.
Yet the church would move on, partnering with Focus on the Family and other churches in a successful program to find homes for Colorado’s orphans.
And church members are now very excited about helping the poorest in its city get affordable basic health care, Boyd said.
“I happen to believe that the primary reason why New Life did not become a used-car lot after a scandal and a shooting is that we never forsook our first love, an unwavering commitment to prayer (and worship),” Boyd wrote. “It was the way we began as a church, and it would pave the path to reclaiming our joy.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
